Cisco Evolves the Router into an Application Delivery Platform: ISR-AX Lowers the Barriers for Delivering an Optimal Application Experience Anywhere

New Cisco Integrated Services Router AX (ISR-AX) Converges Network and Application Services with WAN Optimization Technologies to Enable Organizations to Meet End User Expectations, Regardless of Where Applications are Hosted

March 12, 2013

SAN JOSE, Calif. – March 12, 2013 – The application landscape has dramatically changed as businesses centralize their applications in the data center or move them to the cloud, and begin to migrate the Internet edge to branch offices for efficient cloud access. These shifts in application delivery models are challenging IT's ability to meet the quality of experience businesses require, and raise new security, performance and reliability issues. As organizations define their application strategy, they must evolve their networks to support it, and allow IT to deliver an optimal end user application experience that keeps remote employees productive and the business agile.

To help IT deliver a consistent application experience across all branches, Cisco is today announcing the Cisco® Integrated Services Router with Application Experience (ISR-AX), which converges routing, security technologies, and a comprehensive suite of application-level services into a single-box solution to deliver the essential services needed at branch offices. ISR-AX enables business-critical applications to run faster, and provides network-wide visibility and control for accelerated application deployments, granular performance monitoring, and rapid resolution without the need for any additional devices. Ultimately, this solution helps IT lower the barriers for delivering an optimal experience from anywhere with operational simplicity and lower total cost of ownership.

"Because all traffic goes through the router, it offers a streamlined approach for scaling application services to ensure a high quality of experience across the network," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president, Cisco Enterprise Networking Group (ENG). "With Cisco ISR-AX, Cisco is redefining the role of the router as the application delivery platform and providing our customers with a more affordable solution they can easily deploy across their network."

Recognizing the market need to deliver these capabilities pervasively across the network, the Cisco ISR-AX is up to 35 percent less expensive than alternative vendor WAN optimization appliances. It allows customers to cost-effectively scale the solution network-wide to all of their branch offices with many more capabilities.

"There is an ongoing shift in how applications are being consumed at the network edge, and how they are being delivered, putting even more demands on the enterprise network than ever before," said Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure of IDC. "IDC believes today's networks need to evolve to meet the growing demands for application visibility and performance, which will ultimately result in improved performance for branch services that require applications to be pervasive network wide."

With more than 500,000 worldwide customers and leader in the global enterprise router market share, the Cisco ISR-AX is uniquely positioned to build on the success of Layer 2 and 3 converged network services with Layer 4 through 7 application services, and help IT utilize the router as the platform to simplify migrating applications as the business requires. The Cisco ISR-AX is a foundational element of the Cisco Cloud Intelligent Network that allows IT to prioritize application traffic to deliver the best user experience by addressing application specific performance requirements, resulting greater business agility and employee productivity.

Cisco routing and WAN optimization technology is making an impact with businesses across a variety of markets in a variety of unique deployments:

Robert Kraft, chief information officer at Skanska USA is one such customer: "As one of the largest construction and development networks in the country, we introduce new technology to improve our business and employee productivity to be a sustainable business and injury-free workplace. As we automate our processes, adding more bandwidth was not sufficient and we continued to receive complaints on performance. Cisco WAAS on ISR G2 has helped us create the headroom needed to introduce more technology and has resulted in greater satisfaction from to our end users."

William Bordeau, systems administrator, Boxwood Technology commented, "With up to 5000 calls per week with our clients, Boxwood requires a total solution that measures voice quality end-to-end on live calls and analyzes application metrics on critical business traffic. With Cisco ISR running Application Visibility and Control at our offices and LiveAction management solution from ActionPacked! Networks at our data center, we are able to proactively isolate performance issues before they impact productivity. Voice and data issues that took hours or even days to resolve before can now be addressed in minutes."

Vincent Poulbère, vice president of marketing at SFR, stated, "Our business customers wanted to move from a ‘how many' to a ‘what' visibility. In the past, we provided statistics on how much bandwidth they used, but they wanted to see what was actually being transported. To answer this business challenge, we chose the Cisco AVC technology to build our new Application Visibility Service. The first reactions we got from our customers are very positive: they consider this new service user-friendly, fast and simple."

According to Henry Jo, network architect, Severn Trent Services, "Our offices are scattered around the U.S., including some in rural locations where we cannot upgrade the bandwidth even if we wanted. Cisco WAAS with ISR G2 allows us to use existing bandwidth efficiently and optimize critical business applications like VDI, web, files and email. The solution pays for itself. It saves us a lot of money in bandwidth costs and allows us to meet our end-user needs."

All Cisco 3900-AX, 2900-AX and 1900-AX products are currently available. Cisco will extend the AX router family to the Cisco 800 ISR, Cisco ASR1000 and Cisco CSR1000V Series, providing application services for the teleworker, network edge, data center and cloud.

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